Customer Reviews

Dog Soldiers

5 star:		(25)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

If you came of age in the late 60's and early 70s (as I did) and found yourself at the center of the counterculture (in my case, Madison, Wisconsin), you'll recognize all of the characters who people this extraordinary story. In no book I've read are they rendered with such precision and invested with such uncanny life. Charmian, the heroine dealer, is the most sensuous femme fatale in American Literature. There's Danskin, the hippie narc, turned by the feds to surveil the counterculture -- a far more convincing psychopath than Hannibel Lecter. There's Smitty, the jailbird 'muscle', for Antheil, the 'bent' DEA agent. There's Converse's own mother, nursing home-bound and lost in paranoid dementia -- and my personal favorite, Eddie Peace, the wheeler-dealer who supplies drugs to the Hollywood film community. And these are only the supporting cast. Converse, Hicks and Marge are the richest, deepest, most dimensional protagonists in recent fiction. The story is at once twisting, turning action-adventure (it was made into the wonderful movie, 'Who'll Stop The Rain,' with Nick Nolte, Tuesday Weld and Michael Moriarty, all perfectly cast) as well as a dark parable of the Manson-flavored decline of the Woodstock Generation. Briefly, John Converse, a playwright, has decided to escape a degrading job (he writes for his father-in-law's skin magazines ('Woman Impaled by Falling Skydiver!')) and failing marriage and becomes a freelance journalist in Vietnam. As his tour draws to a close, he has a brainstorm: Buy two kilos of pure, Golden Triangle heroine, smuggle it back into the US and reap the enormous profits. For the smuggling, he calls on old friend Ray Hicks, a merchant marine who's a student of Nietsche and Zen, and 'cultivates the art of self-defense.' Hicks agrees to carry John's skag when the USS Coral Sea departs Vietnam for San Francisco. Trouble is, Charmian's tipped off Antheil, the crooked DEA agent, and he (in the persons of Danskin and Smitty) are waiting for Hicks when he delivers the heroin to Converse's wife, Marge. A page-turning chase ensues that takes Marge and Hicks into the dark netherworld of the Los Angeles drug scene (circa 1970) and ends at a New Mexico commune very like Ken Kesey's own psychedelic ranch. (Stone was one of the drivers on Kesey's bus, 'Further.' Imagine, Ken Kesey, Robert Stone and various Beat poets (Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, et al.) on the same bus! An astonishing time and place!) I can't overstate the excellence of this masterpiece. More than any since Conrad's and Hemingway's (writers Stone's often compared to) this novel confirms that classic quality and rivetting story are not mutually exclusive categories. His two subsequent novels, 'A Flag For Sunrise' and 'Children of Light' are both excellent -- as was his first novel, 'Hall of Mirrors.' ('Flag' may be as good as 'Dog Soldiers.') If you found his last two novels, 'Outerbridge Reach' and 'Damascus Gate,' a bit slow-going and overly 'philosophical,' be advised that early Robert Stone had a much better balance between story and theme.

Also recommended: The 13th Valley by John M. Del Vecchio The Short Timers by Gustaf Hasford The White Album by Joan Didion Rads by Tom Bates Famous Long Ago by Ray Mungo The Stoned Apocalypse by Marco Vassi Ringolevio by Emmett Grogan Going Away by Clancy Sigal

Stone's DOG SOLDIERS is a fine book, but if you happen to see this without exploring the rest of the reviews on Amazon -- access them. The novel was assigned as a high school project in Iowa, and the kids who had to read it seem to have flocked en masse online (perhaps part of the project) to review it. I found reading these reviews very entertaining, and recommend the experience to anyone, though it won't tell you much about the book. I like kids, what can I say. Now that that's out of the way, Stone is one of the most important (and most strangely neglected) writers of the 20th Century. I think comparisons with Hemingway and Conrad are a bit off the mark; this novel is far more reminiscent of COMEDIANS-era Graham Greene, in his troubled Catholicism and concern for the decline of religion in the 20th Century. While Stone is hardly interested in promulgating any particular religious point of view, he IS a moralist, and a scathing critic of what we've become without a sense of God. This novel can be read, I think, as a crucifixion myth of sorts, made relevant to the 20th Century. It IS dark, but it's brilliantly paced and written, and a fairly accurate look at the time it deals with. Stone, by the way, talks of a recurring dream he has, where he's bringing drugs or contraband into a country, usually on a ship, and knows that he is about to be caught. This motif informs the paranoid tenor of the novel. A final point: the title has nothing to do with Lakota warrior societies, and is a bit of a misappropriation. It appears to be a reference to the proverb "better a living dog than a dead lion," which Converse muses on in the text. The outstanding performances by Michael Moriarity as Converse and Richard Masur (who usually seems to have a limited range) as Danskin are two really good reasons to see the film...

I read this book for a college course on the cold war. I couldn't believe my professor. He actually apologized for putting it on the curriculum! He said that it was perhaps too gross, or graphic.... or something. How insulting!...How are we s'poseta learn about the cold war if the teachers teach with sterilized kid gloves. This book is, to Vietnam, a more accessible version of what Gravity's Rainbow is to WWII. It's harsh but not without redemption. Dog soldiers is goods good good...

I first picked up this novel about fifteen years ago, after I'd seen the film adaptation of it-the strangely titled "Who'll Stop the Rain" with Nick Nolte and Michael Moriarty. I had never read any of Stone's work before, and I was absolutely blown away by this, his second novel and winner of the National Book Award. The story of drug smugglers in the waning days of Vietnam, the novel owes much to American Naturalism (Stone has been compared to Conrad, but I think Jack London and Stephen Crane are closer), but filtered through the post-war sensibility of Ken Kesey or even Hunter S. Thomson. Fast-paced and utterly plausible, the narrative ranges from the shadowy cafes of war-time Hanoi to the lawless valleys of the American southwest. Throughout, Stone describes the varying landscapes of moral corruption with equal vividness and intelligence. For my money, "Dog Soldiers" is the best novel of the 70s, and yet it still seems completely contemporary today. I re-read it every few years and always discover something new.

I got a BIG kick out of this book which, I suppose, is indeed intended to be social commentary of some kind. Whether you buy into that angle or not it's an engrossing thriller about a lost generation, a group of people drifting completely without any moral anchor and the inevitable results. Although vaguely anti- establishment in tone the story is really deeply anti- counterculture! Definitely nihilistic, which is not for everyone!

I read this years ago, and saw the movie adaptation, 'Who'll Stop The Rain', and found Stone's take on the questions to what our involvement in southeast asia was and the crippling results of that amoral action hard edged and totally embodied by the pathetic denizens of this novel. From Hicks' stance as a lost samurai to Converse's justification to sell dope and make money it's only natural all who they come in contact with suffer from some delusion or another of what is 'right' . There are no good guys in this book. This was a pretty delusional era and the symbolism of dope as gold as cure all to be lost in the dust of the desert with leisure suited thieves works as a beautiful ending. A hard book to put down, especially for anyone who lived through this time and like Hicks, has a decent sense of irony.

I read this novel after Richard Ford mentioned that Robert Stone was one of his favorite authors, someone who in his mind best deserves the accolade of "getting Vietnam right." Or at least, I thought he said something like that.

Stone is again pretty famous because he has come out with a memoir of his time in the counterculture -- Prime Green -- and that certainly colored my time with this novel.

Stone offers a lot of story in this novel. This is no aching reflection. It is not about peering through drawn shades on to a street in Vietnam, like Kurtz in Apocalypse Now. It is a thrill ride of a drug deal gone horribly wrong.

I suppose that desperation opens well into the moral ambiguities where these characters live. In each of the three main characters -- Ray Hicks, John Converse, and Marge Converse -- their lives have taken a break from normalcy. In Vietnam, Converse runs with a crowd of two faced brothel owners and press corps types. Back in the states, its more of the same: everyone is grifting -- from the police officers to the hippie commune leaders.

My favorite part of this book was the description of the odd stories that Converse wrote while working for his father in law at a second rate tabloid newspaper. "Hungry Skydiver Eats Woman," was a title, I think: that makes sense, in a way, because before he was famous, Stone made a living covering wrestling for local newspapers.

I am glad I read this book. It seems like it was an important story when it came out. I feel glad to have stumbled upon it. I thought I was going to get something historical, and it turned out to be a yarn and a half.

This is as true a take on the corrupting effect of the U.S. involvement in Vietnam as you will find. It is a world in which most people are torn from their moral and ethical moorings. Like Converse, one-third of an unholy triangle that includes his wife, Marge, and his best friend, Ray Hicks. The book is a chronicle of how Ray sticks to his moral code, as the rest of the world goes haywire around him. It's left to the reader to decide who is crazier--Ray or the world he lives in. This book is an essential part of the American experience. If you were of draft age during Vietnam, reading this will confirm for you the craziness of the times. If you weren't, this book provides a window into an era that was even stranger than the current one.

This book is among the top three or four greatest Vietnam War novels ever written -- period. It goes deep deep deep into the human condition, making it, frankly, more than just a book about the war and its aftermath. It's about the irrevocable stain on the American soul, a stain that got there long before the atrocity in Southeast Asia (think European expansionist genocide, think slaughter of the American Indian, think Hiroshima and Nagasaki -- think, think, think.

Dog Soldiers chronicles the promise of the 60s going hideously hay wire. As the flower generation shifts from pot to heroin, the ugly nature of the drug trade, which we know full well now, emerges: corrupt officials, crooked cops, addicts and dealers and violence. This novel captures the wonderful cadences of hippy language. Once the reader gets beyond the seeming cliché of so many `far outs' on its pages, the musicality of the language is apparent; Stone had an excellent ear for dialogue, and quite an incisive wit. All his characters, but especially Converse, express themselves with a minimum amount of words, and much of it slang, but to strong effect.